The Great Return, by Arthur Machen

Chapter 3

A Secret in a Secret Place

Now here was I altogether at a loss and quite bewildered. The children broke into the conversation
of the two ladies and cut it all short, just as the midnight lights from the church came on the field, and when the
little girls and boys went back again to the sands whooping, the tide of talk had turned, and Mrs. Harland and Mrs.
Williams were quite safe and at home with Janey’s measles, and a wonderful treatment for infantile earache, as
exemplified in the case of Trevor. There was no more to be got out of them, evidently, so I left the beach, crossed the
harbour causeway, and drank beer at the “Fishermen’s Rest” till it was time to climb up two miles of deep lane and
catch the train for Penvro, where I was staying. And I went up the lane, as I say, in a kind of amazement; and not so
much, I think, because of evidences and hints of things strange to the senses, such as the savour of incense where no
incense had smoked for three hundred and fifty years and more, or the story of bright light shining from the dark,
closed church at dead of night, as because of that sentence of thanksgiving “for paradise in meat and in drink.”

For the sun went down and the evening fell as I climbed the long hill through the deep woods and the high meadows,
and the scent of all the green things rose from the earth and from the heart of the wood, and at a turn of the lane far
below was the misty glimmer of the still sea, and from far below its deep murmur sounded as it washed on the little
hidden, enclosed bay where Llantrisant stands. And I thought, if there be paradise in meat and in drink, so much the
more is there paradise in the scent of the green leaves at evening and in the appearance of the sea and in the redness
of the sky; and there came to me a certain vision of a real world about us all the while, of a language that was only
secret because we would not take the trouble to listen to it and discern it.

It was almost dark when I got to the station, and here were the few feeble oil lamps lit, glimmering in that lonely
land, where the way is long from farm to farm. The train came on its way, and I got into it; and just as we moved from
the station I noticed a group under one of those dim lamps. A woman and her child had got out, and they were being
welcomed by a man who had been waiting for them. I had not noticed his face as I stood on the platform, but now I saw
it as he pointed down the hill towards Llantrisant, and I think I was almost frightened.

He was a young man, a farmer’s son, I would say, dressed in rough brown clothes, and as different from old Mr.
Evans, the rector, as one man might be from another. But on his face, as I saw it in the lamplight, there was the like
brightening that I had seen on the face of the rector. It was an illuminated face, glowing with an ineffable joy, and I
thought it rather gave light to the platform lamp than received light from it. The woman and her child, I inferred,
were strangers to the place, and had come to pay a visit to the young man’s family. They had looked about them in
bewilderment, half alarmed, before they saw him; and then his face was radiant in their sight, and it was easy to see
that all their troubles were ended and over. A wayside station and a darkening country, and it was as if they were
welcomed by shining, immortal gladness — even into paradise.

But though there seemed in a sense light all about my ways, I was myself still quite bewildered. I could see,
indeed, that something strange had happened or was happening in the little town hidden under the hill, but there was so
far no clue to the mystery, or rather, the clue had been offered to me, and I had not taken it, I had not even known
that it was there; since we do not so much as see what we have determined, without judging, to be incredible, even
though it be held up before our eyes. The dialogue that the Welsh Mrs. Williams had reported to her English friend
might have set me on the right way; but the right way was outside all my limits of possibility, outside the circle of
my thought. The palæontologist might see monstrous, significant marks in the slime of a river bank, but he would never
draw the conclusions that his own peculiar science would seem to suggest to him; he would choose any explanation rather
than the obvious, since the obvious would also be the outrageous — according to our established habit of thought, which
we deem final.

The next day I took all these strange things with me for consideration to a certain place that I knew of not far
from Penvro. I was now in the early stages of the jig-saw process, or rather I had only a few pieces before me, and —
to continue the figure my difficulty was this: that though the markings on each piece seemed to have design and
significance, yet I could not make the wildest guess as to the nature of the whole picture, of which these were the
parts. I had clearly seen that there was a great secret; I had seen that on the face of the young farmer on the
platform of Llantrisant station; and in my mind there was all the while the picture of him going down the dark, steep,
winding lane that led to the town and the sea, going down through the heart of the wood, with light about him.

But there was bewilderment in the thought of this, and in the endeavour to match it with the perfumed church and the
scraps of talk that I had heard and the rumour of midnight brightness; and though Penvro is by no means populous, I
thought I would go to a certain solitary place called the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great
deeps that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where fragments of dreams — they seemed such then
— might, perhaps, be gathered into the clearness of vision.

It was some years since I had been to the Head, and I had gone on that last time and on a former visit by the
cliffs, a rough and difficult path. Now I chose a landward way, which the county map seemed to justify, though
doubtfully, as regarded the last part of the journey. So I went inland and climbed the hot summer by-roads, till I came
at last to a lane which gradually turned turfy and grass-grown, and then on high ground, ceased to be. It left me at a
gate in a hedge of old thorns; and across the field beyond there seemed to be some faint indications of a track. One
would judge that sometimes men did pass by that way, but not often.

It was high ground but not within sight of the sea. But the breath of the sea blew about the hedge of thorns, and
came with a keen savour to the nostrils. The ground sloped gently from the gate and then rose again to a ridge, where a
white farmhouse stood all alone. I passed by this farmhouse, threading an uncertain way, followed a hedgerow
doubtfully; and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire plain of waters and the mist where sea
and sky met. Steep from my feet the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of glorious purple
heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me
and beyond the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp;
green, rounded circumvallations, wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.

Within these smoothed, green mounds, looking across the shining and changing of the waters in the happy sunlight, I
took out the bread and cheese and beer that I had carried in a bag, and ate and drank, and lit my pipe, and set myself
to think over the enigmas of Llantrisant. And I had scarcely done so when, a good deal to my annoyance, a man came
climbing up over the green ridges, and took up his stand close by, and stared out to sea. He nodded to me, and began
with “Fine weather for the harvest” in the approved manner, and so sat down and engaged me in a net of talk. He was of
Wales, it seemed, but from a different part of the country, and was staying for a few days with relations — at the
white farmhouse which I had passed on my way. His tale of nothing flowed on to his pleasure and my pain, till he fell
suddenly on Llantrisant and its doings. I listened then with wonder, and here is his tale condensed. Though it must be
clearly understood that the man’s evidence was only second-hand; he had heard it from his cousin, the farmer.

So, to be brief, it appeared that there had been a long feud at Llantrisant between a local solicitor, Lewis
Prothero (we will say), and a farmer named James. There had been a quarrel about some trifle, which had grown more and
more bitter as the two parties forgot the merits of the original dispute, and by some means or other, which I could not
well understand, the lawyer had got the small freeholder “under his thumb.” James, I think, had given a bill of sale in
a bad season, and Prothero had bought it up; and the end was that the farmer was turned out of the old house, and was
lodging in a cottage. People said he would have to take a place on his own farm as a labourer; he went about in
dreadful misery, piteous to see. It was thought by some that he might very well murder the lawyer, if he met him.

They did meet, in the middle of the market-place at Llantrisant one Saturday in June. The farmer was a little black
man, and he gave a shout of rage, and the people were rushing at him to keep him off Prothero.

“And then,” said my informant, “I will tell you what happened. This lawyer, as they tell me, he is a great big
brawny fellow, with a big jaw and a wide mouth, and a red face and red whiskers. And there he was in his black coat and
his high hard hat, and all his money at his back, as you may say. And, indeed, he did fall down on his knees in the
dust there in the street in front of Philip James, and every one could see that terror was upon him. And he did beg
Philip James’s pardon, and beg of him to have mercy, and he did implore him by God and man and the saints of paradise.
And my cousin, John Jenkins, Penmawr, he do tell me that the tears were falling from Lewis Prothero’s eyes like the
rain. And he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the deed of Pantyreos, Philip James’s old farm that was, and did
give him the farm back and a hundred pounds for the stock that was on it, and two hundred pounds, all in notes of the
bank, for amendment and consolation.

“And then, from what they do tell me, all the people did go mad, crying and weeping and calling out all manner of
things at the top of their voices. And at last nothing would do but they must all go up to the churchyard, and there
Philip James and Lewis Prothero they swear friendship to one another for a long age before the old cross, and everyone
sings praises. And my cousin he do declare to me that there were men standing in that crowd that he did never see
before in Llantrisant in all his life, and his heart was shaken within him as if it had been in a whirl-wind.”

I had listened to all this in silence. I said then:

“What does your cousin mean by that? Men that he had never seen in Llantrisant? What men?”

“The people,” he said very slowly, “call them the Fishermen.”

And suddenly there came into my mind the “Rich Fisherman” who in the old legend guards the holy mystery of the
Graal.